I’M NOT SURE WHAT TO SAY. For pilots, that a colleague may have intentionally crashed his plane and killed everybody on board, is not only horrific but embarrassing, offensive, and potentially stigmatizing to the entire profession.
This would not the first instance of a crewmember committing a murderous act. In 1994, an off-duty FedEx pilot, riding along in a cockpit jumpseat, attacked the crew of a DC-10 freighter with a hammer and spear gun. A PSA jet once crashed after a disgruntled employee shot both pilots. And most notorious of all, a suicidal first officer brought down EgyptAir flight 990 flying from New York to Cairo in 1999.
I worry now is that every time a plane goes down and the reason is not immediately obvious, people will begin proposing suicide as a possible cause. Try to remember that even if we include the SilkAir crash or the or unsolved MH370 disaster, acts of crewmember sabotage account for a tiny number of incidents over the many decades — and, regrettably, the many accidents — of civil aviation. If indeed the Germanwings first officer crashed his plane, that’s tragic and unforgivable. But it was, for lack of a better description, a freak event, something highly unusual. Hopefully the traveling public realizes that the rest of the tens of thousands airline pilots out there take their profession, and your safety, as seriously as they possibly can.
People will be asking: how many pilots out there are ready to crack? Is the mental health of pilots being evaluated properly by airlines and government regulators?
In the U.S., airline pilots undergo medical evaluations either yearly or twice-yearly. A medical certificate must be issued by an FAA-certified physician. The checkup is not a psychological checkup per se, but the FAA doctor evaluates a pilot on numerous criteria, up to and including his or her mental health. Pilots can be grounded for any of hundreds of reasons, from heart trouble or diabetes to, yes, depression and anxiety. It can and does happen. In addition, new-hire pilots at some airlines must undergo psychological examinations prior to being hired. On top of that, we are subject to random testing for narcotics and alcohol.
As for the stresses of the job, it’s no different from any other line of work. People are people, and there’s always some element of one’s personal life that is brought to work. Sometimes pilots are dealing with one or another problem or stress issue. That does not mean the pilot is unsafe, or is going to crash the plane. Most airlines, meanwhile, are pretty proactive and accommodating when it comes to employees with personal or mental health problems.
I’m uncertain what more we should want or expect. Pilots are human beings, and no profession is bulletproof against every human weakness. All the medical testing in the world, meanwhile, isn’t going to preclude every potential breakdown or malicious act. For passengers, at certain point there needs to be the presumption that the men and women in control of your airplane are exactly the highly skilled professionals you expect them to be, and not killers in waiting.
March 26, 2015
SOME preliminary thoughts, comments, and cautionaries on Tuesday’s crash of a Germanwings Airbus A320 in France, drawn from some of the points being made by the media:
— The descent
Reportedly the plane descended 31,000 feet in eight minutes before impacting the mountains. Some news sources are citing this as an unusually high rate. This is false. A roughly four thousand foot-per-minute descent is not particularly steep, and would imply the crew was still in control of the aircraft, and that it was not “plummeting” or “diving,” as reporters have described it, as a result of some catastrophic structural failure.
People are talking a lot about the possibility of a decompression (loss of cabin pressure), but a simple decompression by itself is not likely to be the culprit. So long as they aren’t explosive, decompressions are rarely dangerous. That’s true even when flying over mountains. Crews will pre-program so-called “escape routes” into a plane’s flight management system that will help navigate them away from high terrain in the event a rapid descent is required.
One person I spoke to raised the possibility that the crew, after initiating what was a more or less stable descent rate, became unconscious somehow as the plane descended, maybe as a result of not donning their oxygen masks quickly enough after a decompression. Pure speculation there, but it’s possible (as are a hundred other things). It’s clear that at some point the crew either lost control, became disoriented, or were incapacitated. We don’t know how.
— The missing mayday
One supposed expert on NBC voiced that it was “highly unusual” that the pilots did not send a distress call. The opposite is true. Distress calls are not sent in a majority of accidents, and communicating with air traffic control is well down the task hierarchy when dealing with an emergency. The crew’s primary concern, it should go without saying, is controlling the aircraft, followed by troubleshooting whatever problems have caused the situation. Later, if time and conditions permit, ATC can be brought into the loop. There’s an old aviation maxim that says: aviate, navigate, communicate. Communicate, you’ll notice, is number three on that list. Eight minutes might seem a long time, but who knows what level of urgency they were dealing with.
— Hack job?
This again: the theory that the plane’s “flight computer,” whatever that is, exactly, was maliciously hacked by parties unknown. People are so enamored of electronic gadgetry these days, and so vastly ill-informed as to how airplanes actually fly, and how pilots interact with all of the alleged computerization in a modern cockpit, that this bizarre theory is given undue credibility, and thrown around to help fill in the empty spaces. The media has been shamelessly gullible when it comes to this topic, and the public needs to be wary of those who’ve been interviewed or quoted. Typically they have very little knowledge about the operational realities of flying commercial planes.
— Crash cluster?
It would seem, to some, that the number of plane crashes over the past several months has skyrocketed. But although, from a safety perspective, it hasn’t been the best twelve-month stretch, you need to look at things in the larger context: The accident rate is still down, considerably, from what it was twenty or thirty years ago, when multiple large-scale accidents were the norm, year after year. What’s different is that, in years past, we didn’t have a 24/7 news cycle with media outlets spread across multiple platforms, all vying simultaneously for your attention. The media didn’t used to fixate on crashes the way it does today. These fixations tend to be short-lived, but they are intense enough to give people the impression that flying is becoming more dangerous, when in fact it has become safer.
I frequently remind people of the year 1985, when 27 serious accidents killed upwards of 2,500 people. That includes two of history’s ten deadliest crashes occurring within two months of each other. Imagine the circus if such a thing happened today. The past decade has been the safest in civil aviation history, and the cluster of serious accidents over the last year, tragic as they’ve been, is unlikely to change the overall trend.
